Over the past twenty years, I've written about esolangs as a hacker folk art for the blog esoteric.codes, bringing the voice of many esolangers together, to find crossover in their approach to computation as a medium. Meanwhile, I've produced esolangs of my own, recently brought together by MIT Press in Forty-Four Esolangs.

This talk brings together both projects, to show the potential of this hacker folk art to go far beyond the listicles of puzzle languages and joke languages with which it is often associated. Its languages ask programmers to write code as a series of photographs, or by two programmers typing in tandem, or using global variables that are global across the world. It presents esolangs as challenges to conventional ideas about code: everything from "the cognitive gap between the text and performance of code should be as small possible" to "languages should lead to runnable programs" or even "code should be written with intent."

This talk emphasizes esolangs as a community form built on dialogue between esolangers and the esoprogrammers who explore their ideas and find the limits of their languages. I hope to inspire more programmers to recognize esolangs as our own space of play and embrace it as an experimental medium. In this moment, when AI tools help reinforce a particular, corporatized vision of how code should look, esolangs offer resistance to this monostyle and against the de-skilling of programming as art.